Morecambe has too much history to be one of austerity's casualties

The failed regeneration of Morecambe is a depressing example of how the private sector cannot thrive if the state's hacked back

Morecambe Bay: The town is struggling in its efforts to regenerate itself.

Eva Skawinska is 47. In her native Warsaw she worked as a hospital radiographer. Now she runs a restaurant on Morecambe seafront – Eva's, where the standard of food surpasses most of what you'd find in the average British town centre.

One problem: the business sits in the midst of what amounts to a huge but half-finished regeneration project, dealt blows by the recession and the austerity that has followed it. "We opened at a bad time," she says – and she's not wrong. If takings stay much the same, she tells me, Eva's won't remain open for much longer than a year.

Her story is presumably the same as that of scores of small-scale risk takers who took a punt on the revival of the English seaside – witness optimistic pre-recession talk about Hastings, Margate, Folkestone and more. The hope was that dreams dangled in property columns and Sunday supplements might somehow take flight, but they have often plunged earthwards, like those infamous birdmen on Bognor pier.